"La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman and Other Examples of Magic"

The following illustrates in some sense what I aim at with Floridia at Dusk. Its a piece of work I wrote as an undergraduate that I think did a decent job of bridging the gap between my experiences in Colorado and Florida. There are things in it that I find silly when I look at it now: the use of "magic with a k" I could do without, because really as has been said by many before me, spelling magic "magick" really demonstrates more than anything else, that you are a git who should not be paid attention to. But my questionable magical metaphysics not-withstanding here is "La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman and Other Examples of Magick" (christ that bloody k!)


The Weeping Woman and Other Examples of Magick

Every now and then Karen gets antsy and acts upon the urge to go in search of what she obsessively calls "the real Florida." I have never witnessed any of these occasions but Val has told me stories about many of these road trips to nowhere, of boring car rides through Florida potato fields and the like, and they have got me thinking. I've come to realize that in her backwards, back roads kind of way, Karen is looking for a place where magick, with a k, still exists.

I've come to find magick here, though magick in Florida is different from magick in Colorado. In Florida it takes a little effort to find, since it lies beyond the empire that Disney has forged from swampland and orange grove. Florida's magick lies in Negro folktale and everglades, salt marshes and abandoned churches, the mystery of alligator alley where one can go without trace of what most of us know as civilization. Driving through this alternate Florida I've suddenly found myself suddenly surrounded by greenery, lush and dense, wrapping itself out onto the road and around the car. In some places the trees arch over the highways and byways canopying the pavement filtering sunlight to a low flicker through branches. When I roll the window down and turn the radio of and just drive without seeing signs of a human being, every noise outside becomes important, every rustling could be some new threat or blessing. In this Florida where magick still occurs, gatormen roam the swamps and mermaids swim in the Matanzes inlet and at Weeki Wachee.

Growing up in Colorado magick is found in other places. Colorado's myths are things of high Rocky Mountains, low plains, a conflagration of Indian and immigrant lore. There is a town, for instance, called Manitou Springs, where sulfur water boils to the surface, a sacred space, a place that feels different from the world around it. Its the home, the neighboring tribes say, to the Manitou, spirits or gods depending on how you look at it; good, or bad depending on which tribe you ask. However, all the tribes in the area agree the place is one of power. The Ute Indians would cross the mountains through Manitou, and I have hiked those trails, which twist and turn. Gullies and hills rise along the mountain paths, and high-grass and around every rock-solid corner a spirit.

Or take the story of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman of Mexican folklore. A young woman, she, in most versions of the tale, drowned her children in a river. She now wanders from place to place, mourning what she did when blinded by rage. In some versions she wanders looking for children to replace the ones she lost.

I saw her once, or should I say I almost saw her.

I was at the Pueblo Nature Center late one night, smoking and staring out at the Arkansas river a melancholy feeling building inside of me. The wind whistled around me, current splashing with fine-tuned movement, like some elemental clockwork, sounding a vague liquid flip-flop every second or so. In this early fall the air felt cool but not yet brisk. I was probably crying, lamenting, my own lost love, not drowned or even dead, but lost into self-imposed exile from me. She had ended the relationship just a few days before and I was the worse for wear.

I looked out at the river bank, a September moon shining down. The moon's light gave everything an aspect of twilight, not too dark, but nothing clearly visible either. And there down the river was magick, down the river was La Llorona.

She was beautiful, even though her face was streaked with tears. Her jet black hair framed a face which looked architecturally feminine. Her lips bloomed full and those eyes from which those tears fell were almond shaped and as brown as her Hispanic skin. She wore a white dress, which clung to her in the wind and she walked with a kind of grace, like one trying to perform penance.

There she stood, this archetypal symbol of grief, lamenting her actions. And there I sat lamenting loss, but wasn't I also partially to blame, had I not made mistakes and committed small scale atrocities that I should be lamenting. But I did not see her, I told you, I almost saw her.


The wonderful thing about the ancient Greeks is that quite often they had several words for everything. To describe location they have two words Topos and Chora. Topos is where we get our modern word topography and it means where exactly in space a location lies. It has to do with coordinates, altitude and positions on maps. Chora on the other hand is where our word choreography comes from (to put meaning to movement I believe though I could be wrong) and deals with what a place means; what a place means to people, to them and in relationship with them.

The soul of a place, the place which is sacred, the place where magick occurs, lies somewhere other than simply topos. It is a place, not simply dependent upon physical space and maps and coordinates, just as it is not dependent on fact and literal history. Rather it is an interaction between these things and the chora. It comes from the feelings people have about a space, the stories they tell and how they interact with that space.

La Llorona for instance, is a tiny fragment of that place's soul, which is not necessarily confined to that place; there are reports of La Llorona as far as Montana. She seems to follow large migrations of Mexican Americans. However in some sense also, La Llorona will never leave the nature center in Pueblo. It is part of the magick which forms a world we sometimes forget exists, a world we feel the loss of under concrete and homogenized culture. It's still present like a ghost walking along a river bank, something you can almost see, but very rarely grasp.